Celebrities, wellbeing gurus and even MPs are catching the mindfulness bug. Abi Jackson heads to Westminster for the launch of the Mindful Nation UK interim report to find out more

Last Wednesday afternoon, in the middle of a busy working day, I closed my eyes to meditate.

Only briefly – but sometimes just taking five minutes to slow down and connect with your breaths and centre your thoughts can work wonders for balancing stress levels.

Tackling that to-do list becomes less overwhelming, negotiating those crowds on the commute home doesn’t see your blood pressure soar so much.

There’s nothing unusual about this, of course. Mindfulness meditation is all the rage and thousands of people from all walks of life have been taking it up and discovering a more steady, manageable and present way of being, even finding a life-changing way of coping with depression, anxiety and chronic pain.

But what is very unusual about my particular little session, are the surroundings.

I’m in a small room off Westminster Hall in the Houses of Parliament, along with a few other journalists, mental health charity bods and various MPs – all also sitting, eyes closed, hands on laps and breathing deeply, as Rebecca Crane of Bangor University’s Centre for Mindfulness guides us through.

We’re here for the launch of the Mindful Nation UK interim report. The Mindfulness All-Party Parliamentary Group and a number of leaders in the field have spent eight months looking at the benefits of mindfulness, evidence backing up these benefits, and how it might be incorporated into education, healthcare, work and criminal justice.

The hope, in a nutshell, is for the Government to recognise the importance of wellbeing in society and how those holding the budget-strings could give it some funding.

For this to happen, as former Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell points out, it all boils down to strong, solid facts and figures.

“The way I see it, it should be about enhancing the wellbeing of the nation,” says O’Donnell, a key advocate of wellbeing economics.

Healthy GDP and a healthy nation, he believes, can go hand in hand, providing we look at it in the right way. A pound spent on mental health, he notes, is “at the margin, hugely more productive than a pound spent on physical health”, and yet that isn’t reflected in the current system.

If anecdotal evidence was all it took to convince the Treasury, then addressing this would be easy – but the Treasury are going to want hefty, carefully analysed trials. It could also mean a shift in what we measure.

For example, mindfulness in schools may or may not have a significant immediate impact on exam results – one of the key things currently used to measure success in education – but it could hugely improve harmony in classrooms, behavioural problems, stress among teachers, sickness rates, self-esteem – the list could go on and on. These things will then have a positive snowball effect through years to come, including, ultimately, less strain on the NHS and welfare budgets.

Mental Health Foundation chief executive Jenny Edwards agrees that “the big thing that will come out in the summer is the weight of evidence”.

She’s heard there’s something in the region of 250 studies from the last year alone, and says it’s “a very exciting time” to see mindfulness being discussed.

“I think we have to be careful not to say it is a panacea for everything, because that wouldn’t be right, and nobody is particularly recommending it at present for people who are in the middle of serious mental illness, people will need more intensive therapies for that – the main problem is, we’re not very good at providing them on the right timescales,” Edwards explains. “That has to change.

“So mindfulness is not the whole story, but it is a very important part of the story, and it will reduce the pressure on services.”